As everyone may recall, there was a heck of a hoopla last year at about this time with regard to Y2K and the new millennium.
Y2K was a gigantic piece of hype, second only perhaps in magnitude over the past couple of years to the Presidential election in November and afterward. The world seems to crave a steady diet of hype - empty intellectual calories - but I digress...
In the corners of the celebrations last year, there was a vocal minority of smug know-it-alls (Al Franken among them) going around telling anyone who would listen that January 1, 2000 did not mark the start of the new millennium, but that the True Date of the New Millennium would be January 1, 2001.
Their reasoning relies upon a nuance of mathematics. If one does not start at zero, then the first one hundred objects counted - be they sheep or years - range from 1 to 100. Therefore, the start of the second group of hundred objects will start at 101.
Extending this argument to millennia, we find the first millennium spans the years 1 to 1000, the second extends from 1001 to 2000, and finally the third will commence in 2001.
This argument is delivered, typically, with the same faith in mathematical precicion that made me dislike my 9th grade math teacher with a passion, and leads some into a second profession as members of the usage police (you, know, those annoying folks who stop to tell you that what you meant to say was "I feel nauseated," and proceed to lecture you - innocently oblivious to your discomfort - on the difference between things that are "nauseous" and "nauseating"), but I digress yet again...
The fact is that, for the vast majority of people throughout history, and for a hell of a lot of people today, the precision with which we pursue exactitude in time would have been and continues to be inconceivable. To state that the millennium starts on January 1, 2001 is akin to saying that there is one and only one correct way to pronounce `semper fidelis'.
You see, nobody was around at midnight on January 1, 1 A.D. to punch a stopwatch and start the count. In fact, it turns out that the 'anno domini' notation (abbreviated 'A.D.' and meaning "the Year of Our Lord" in Latin) was introduced somewhere in the middle of the sixth century after the birth of Christ.
The approximation was pretty good (less than 1% error), but contemporary historians believe that Christ was actually born a bit earlier than the calendar would imply...somewhere around 3 or 4 B.C. ("B.C.," by the way, is a notation that was not anticipated by the Church, and stands for "before Christ.")
But this assumes that there was a year 1 A.D., which there wasn't. Not really. After all, if you had consulted with the wisest and most knowledgeable scholars of what we now call the third century A.D., none of them would have the foggiest idea of what you were talking about if you were to mention the year 1 A.D.
The same goes for 2, 3, and so on, until a fellow named Dennis The Short introduced the notion around 554 A.D., adopting the standard Julian trappings, complete with leap year and all.
By the late sixteenth century, it became apparent in Europe that the calendar was sick. Easter - which is today celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox - was threatening to wander all over the map. Half of Europe celebrated the New Year in March.
Things were a mess.
Pope Gregory introduced his famous reforms in the late 16th century, which basically chopped 13 days from the calendar, established January 1 as the start of the year, and implemented a few other details, including a clever modification to the leap year algorithm.
Despite this change, if you want to know what day of the week January 1, 1700 fell on, there is no one answer. Why? Because different countries adopted the Catholic proposal at different times. By the beginning of the 20th century, the only "major" country to not have adopted the Gregorian calendar was Russia, and the Orthodox Church still sets Christmas according to the Old Style, which is January 7, New Style.
The fact of the matter is that nobody really cared much what day of the week January 1, 1700 fell on - or whether the day belonged to the sixteenth or seventeenth century - because most people in those days were illiterate, and virtually all but the most wealthy owned no timepiece.
Historically, time has always been pretty inexact, over the long run, only becoming exact in the 20th century (and only in the latter half, when navigation-quality pocket and wrist watches became widely available). We now measure Olympic events to the thousandth of a second, because we can. Our astronomers insert "leap seconds" into the time stream to keep atomic clocks synchronized with the heavens. It is this passion for exactitude that, in my opinion, fuels this passion for insisting that the Millennium starts in just a couple of days.
In the final analysis, events happen when people decide they happen, just as languages reflect what it is people want to say. We all accept Pope Gregory's decree (if we can forget folks who go by numbers that are far from 2000, who live in China, India, and the Middle East, among other places), presumably because all the principals involved are long dead, we're used to what we're used to, and anyway, having the decision come down from a figure in authority gives us the warm fuzzies.
That said, however, there are some who stridently refuse to go along with the popular "usage" that looks upon the 1999-to-2000 change as the millennium change, because they seek, or insist on the existence of, a measure of exactitude (understandable, as we live in times where everything is measured to several significant digits) that the subject simply does not warrant.
Every day marks the start of a new millennium. The air will not smell crisper on the morning of the "real" new millennium, because there is no such thing, except for what we create in our minds.
Have a great New Year. And may all your time be good time.
Cheers...
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